


We Were Phoenixes || Kuroo Tetsurou

by Rot_Llaves



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Ahahahahaha, Alternate Universe - Dystopia, Alternate Universe - Spies & Secret Agents, Angst, Angst and Feels, Character Death, Complicated Relationships, Eventually Aged-up Characters, F/M, Falling In Love, Fluff and Angst, Foul Language, Friendship, Gen, How did it come to this, Kuroo just wanted to be a ninja, Love, Love and Loss, Major Character Injury, Mild Gore, Murder, Non-Linear Narrative, Secret Agent Academy, Slightly Dystopian AU, Then and Now, There's no volleyball in this at all, Yaku's Twin, familial feels, spy AU
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-03
Updated: 2020-12-29
Packaged: 2021-03-04 00:27:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 6
Words: 12,807
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24534565
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rot_Llaves/pseuds/Rot_Llaves
Summary: 𝓘 𝓱𝓪𝓭 𝓪 𝓭𝓻𝓮𝓪𝓶 𝓪𝓫𝓸𝓾𝓽 𝓪 𝓫𝓾𝓻𝓷𝓲𝓷𝓰 𝓱𝓸𝓾𝓼𝓮.𝓨𝓸𝓾 𝔀𝓮𝓻𝓮 𝓼𝓽𝓾𝓬𝓴 𝓲𝓷𝓼𝓲𝓭𝓮,  𝓘 𝓬𝓸𝓾𝓵𝓭𝓷'𝓽 𝓰𝓮𝓽 𝔂𝓸𝓾 𝓸𝓾𝓽.There wasn't a lot about Kuroo Tetsurou's life that had been his decision. Chiyome certainly hadn't been someone he wanted to spend time with - she was more like the only starter to his flames of rage. That changed, though, somewhere along the line and she became the only thing keeping the fire going.But all of that was just ashes now.[Kuroo Tetsurou x OC] [Fanfiction inspired by the original work of Haruichi Furudate][Spy/Slightly Dystopian AU] [Character Deaths] [Mild Gore] [Foul Language]
Relationships: Haikyuu!! Ensemble/Original Character(s), Kuroo Tetsurou/Original Female Character(s), Yaku Morisuke/Original Female Character (sister)
Kudos: 3





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first time ever attempting a fan fiction set in an alternate universe, but I was incredibly excited to take a crack at it.
> 
> Thank you for taking a chance on my story and I hope that you enjoy reading it as much I enjoyed writing it.

The beating of his heart was echoing off the sides of the hallway and the lack of furniture and decorations in the small house were, for sure, amplifying the rhythmic thumping. Kuroo Tetsurou was certain of it. That was clearly the reason the only thing he could hear right now was the ocean, despite any naturally running water being more than an hour’s drive away.

And the reason why he felt like he couldn’t swallow… well, he couldn’t quite put his finger on that one, but it certainly wasn’t because his emotions were trying to claw their way out of his heart and up his throat. No — he’d had that trained out of him years ago.

If he was being honest though, he had also been trained to know when he was second guessing himself or when his brain was trying to make excuses for something it couldn’t, or didn’t want to, understand. Right now, he didn’t want to admit that the moisture in his palms wasn’t due to the weather (he couldn’t very well blame it on the humidity when it was snowing outside) and he hadn’t yawned recently enough to to blame that for the blurring of his vision. 

To be perfectly frank, he was an emotional wreck walking down that narrow hallway — the perfect embodiment of everything he was supposed to _not_ be as one of the top intelligence agents in Japan — but there was hardly anything he could do about it. He was _that_ nervous and upset.

His hand shook as he went to turn the plastic door knob that was etched to look like some elegant crystal back in the ‘70s but now dated the house more than any yellow paint or green appliance could. The most important lost treasure in the world was waiting for him behind that door and his pounding heart and quivering hands seemed to acknowledge that far better than his rational, trained mind could. His tactical side was telling him to stop — that he wasn’t ready to see what was on the other side of that hollow wood door — but that god-forsaken organ in his chest was working overtime to override logic by overloading his brain with oxygen.

When the heart wants to win, not even government-sanctioned military training can keep it at bay. Some might call that foolish sentimentality, but Kuroo knew better than anyone that sometimes, you just have to trust your gut. 

The door squeaked as it opened (another sign of age and neglect). The noise should have set him off. An absence of sound was literally part of the job description, but the lost treasure was waiting for him and, maybe, he could spare the rules this once when they’d already taken so much away. 

\- - -

Thinking back, Kuroo had never felt particularly salty about this whole thing. Sure, when the government showed up at his front door and his grandmother started crying, he had a brief, cold trickle of fear, but the whole gig sounded way too fucking cool for him to ever consider feeling unlucky. 

When he was packing up his things into that single, hard, grey suitcase, his dad had gone out of his way to sit on his bed the entire time and talk about how much he and Kuroo’s grandparents would miss him, how the house would be quieter without him running around and how they always, _always_ knew that their boy was something special. _It was an honor_ , his dad had said. _Only 30 thirteen year-olds are chosen each year. You must be something amazing to have caught their eye_. 

It never occurred to his barely-teenager mind that there was an overwhelming air of loss as he walked out the door of his childhood house, not set to return until he was a full-fledged spy or in a wooden box. He was way too excited — thinking about how he’d be the second coming of Hattori Hanzo — to notice the tears in the corners of his father’s (a man who had already lost his wife and was now having his only child taken away) eyes. 

From the moment he sat down in that nondescript back sedan and waved his hand out of the window at his family and his best friend, standing there with an almost indistinguishable frown on his lips, he never looked back and never once questioned if moving forward was best for him.

Until he was racing down the street of a quiet neighborhood with one hand on the wheel of his government-issued SUV as he tried desperately to get a hold of the woman behind his only programmed speed dial, over and over and over again. 

“Dammit,” he cursed, throwing the phone into the passenger seat and returning his right hand to the steering wheel. He’d been calling her for the past 30 minutes since Daichi rushed into his office hurriedly uttering the words Kuroo had been dreading since practically basic training.

“Chiyome’s cover was blown,” he had said, his smartphone still in his hand as he rushed through the doorway so fast the door knob shattered the glass panel behind it. Kuroo had thought there could never be words that held more potential dread behind them then the phrase that left his fellow agent’s mouth, but the way the next sentence hit him in the gut proved him wrong. “Your house is on fire; they think she’s still inside.”

Kuroo was out the door of his office faster than either man could blink and Daichi was left there, phone in hand, staring at an empty desk as slamming doors echoed down the hallway toward the building’s entrance. In the parking garage, Kuroo dropped his keys twice, trying in earnest to remove them from his left pant pocket and press the green button on the fob enough times to identify his black SUV among all the other black cars in the rows of black cars. 

He was out of the underground garage in less than a minute from entering his car and was tearing down the street at ungodly speeds, leaving trails of tire marks with each turn toward his home in the suburbs. He hadn’t stayed long enough to hear that the fire had started more than 15 minutes ago, that there had been no sign of anyone trying to get out, despite several reports of men running from the house about 30 minutes before the dark, grey smoke started pluming out of those old wood and glass windows that Chiyome had fallen in love with enough to claim that _this house_ was the house of their dreams. In his panicked haste — the type of response he was supposed to be above at this point in his career — he didn’t stick around long enough to hear that they already had agents in route and that, specifically Agent Yaku was on his way as well, but they had little hope of doing more than the fire department already was. He didn’t hear that Chiyome, as far as they knew, hadn’t left the house all day and hadn’t been seen since the emergency was called in. 

The street their beautiful, little house resided on was blocked off when he finally got to it and he was forced to hurriedly drive his car up on the curb of the cross street, jam the thing into park and sprint out the door without bothering to turn it off. His feet knew the way home, regardless of distance, and took him past the two houses across and seven houses down from the corner on muscle memory alone. He ran straight up to those angry, red engines and attempted to keep his momentum up straight through their barricade, but was clotheslined by a pair of arms donned in yellow and orange. 

If he was in the right state of mind, he could have pushed past them — pulled out something from the long list of moves and techniques he’d honed since he was a gangly 13 year-old with nothing on his mind but becoming a kick-ass ninja — but his eyes were fully on the flames pouring out of every crevice of that sad, two bedroom house that had once been the most beautiful home he’d ever known and his entire will to even put one more foot forward leaked out through his eyes. 

The yellow and orange-clad arms caught him as he knees gave out and the grief building up in his chest escaped out his opened mouth. He _knew_ that smell coming from his burning home — knew it better than any decent person should. 

She was just there! This morning, she’d stood at the door and kissed him goodbye with the same words she spoke to him every time they parted: “Come back to me, okay?” Her light brown hair had been down this morning, curling around the edges because she had towel dried instead of blowing it out, and her smile was still fresh in his mind. 

Kuroo hadn’t kissed her lips that morning. He regretted that the most as he sat on the curb opposite his house and watched it smother into ashes on the ground.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The first two lines of this story's summary are from a song called ["Burning House"](https://youtu.be/uyGSe76rAJc) by Cam, which was a major inspiration behind this fan fiction. While the circumstances behind the song and this story are not very similar, I wanted to try my hand at tackling the same kind of feel that the song holds — one of almost hopelessness, a sense of loss and a fondness for something in the past. 
> 
> I don't know if I stuck to those parameters too well, but I'm not upset with where it went. (Though I am still really nervous about its reception. __φ(．．;) )


	2. Chapter 2

The buzzing of a room filled with people was something Kuroo never really enjoyed. It was kind of like being drowned out of existence with sound. Standing among the other 30 teenagers in that glorified conference room in the center of the nondescript building, smack dab in the middle of Tokyo, he couldn't tell if his feelings on crowds had changed. The air was filled with equal parts melancholy, tension, anxiety and anticipation. The other children were wearing their emotions so fully on their sleeves, that it was like he could reach out and touch their fear and sorrow.

There were small groups of kids grouped together, likely students from the same schools or neighborhoods, who talked amongst themselves, but for the most part it seemed the other children were in the same boat as him — alone in a room full of people. It gave him the same sort of clenching around his heart he got when he first moved into that house next to Kenma, right after losing his mother. There was just the tiniest flicker of curiosity within him, but mostly there was raging trepidation tingling in his limbs as he faced the unknown.

All of it was new — even relatively so to the uniform-clad men and women observing the group from the front of the room. The new government in Japan had started this drafting program only a few years prior as the desperate need for well-trained special agents grew astronomically in a world ravaged by distrust and conflict and an unprecedented drop in citizens willing to put their lives in danger for honor and country. The populace had turned to lives of quiet solitude, shying away from unsleeping cities that were easy targets to enemies and turned to suburban, and even rural, life and passing on the type of jobs that only increased the unending suffering of the world.

But the people refusing to take part in the military and intelligence fields only forced the government to take drastic measures — starting undodgeable drafts and training programs that would ensure the country had the means to hold its own on the national stage. The decision had been made almost entirely by the recently elected officials six years ago and had been met with ardent push back, but in the end the government started taking the children on a yearly basis, regardless.

It was a program the likes of the United States, China and Russia had already enacted, which hardly put Japan in good company but it also gave them the potential to match their strength. (A pipe dream really for an island country, but a government can dream — can’t it?)

The first year they had only taken 10 “applicants” and learned, far too quickly, that small humans flickered like kindling and were snuffed out just as easily. The next year they opted for rounding up 20 of the most promising, intelligent and athletic children in the country before settling on a solid 30 in the third year of the program, just to ensure they had enough fires still burning at the end of their first year of training. Now, in the seventh year of the program, the country could boast of a robust intelligence academy and a thriving intelligence agency.

There was something special about this incoming class, though, and it wasn’t just the potential they saw in the selected children. It was true that, it seemed, this crop was just the edge of what analysts were calling “a forthcoming monster generation,” but there was something even more peculiar about this year’s gathering of applicants.

This year, there were 31.

\- - -

Nekomata Yasufumi would be lying if he said there wasn’t at least one family in his district each year that fought the process of selection. Without fail, a particularly distraught father or overly-emotional mother would curse his name or bang on his chest calling him things like “monster,” “heartless” or even something like “war criminal.”

Not even he was sure if he would call their searing insults wrong. It wasn’t like he enjoyed rounding up these children every year and forcing them to say goodbye to everything they’ve known for the foreseeable future — it had just become part of the job that he couldn’t seem to find his way out of. But he had made a promise to himself after the first year, after every single one of the young adults he picked up that spring had been buried by fall, that he could keep the public face as a monster as long as it granted him the ability to ensure that _his_ students made it past July.

This was his seventh year, now, of knocking on doors, making quiet announcements and returning in a few days to gather the applicants. This year had gone surprisingly smooth for him, despite the circumstances, until he stopped outside of that green, two story house for the second time in two weeks to gather his last ward. He should have known it’d been too easy up to this point.

There were certain things he had been trained to notice about children when the program had started. It wasn’t like they were necessarily looking for warning signs of future deserters or, God forbid, traitors, but they were taught to recognize the difference between strength, stubbornness and loyalty. Yaku Chiyome’s reaction to her selection hadn’t set off any major warning bells in his head when he first visited her and it wasn’t like the scowl on her face during his brief conversation with the Yaku family had set her apart in his mind from the long list of others filed away in his head — even though the depth of the lines around her lips were well beyond her years. The fact that she was waiting out on the porch for him the day he was to take her away, though… that raised some flags.

“I’m not going with you,” she said to him with a calm even tone she shouldn’t have been able to use, given the circumstances, as she rose from the porch the moment he set down the small path to her home.

“Oh?” Nekomata responded, confusion and a little bit of amusement on his face.

“Yes,” she stated plainly. “My mother will need my help with the baby on the way… and I’m not leaving my brother behind.”

Nekomata sighed as he stood next to her and slowly motioned for the two of them to sit down on the top step of the porch. He took a long look at her with a weary smile on his face and pat her knee gently.

“You and I both know you hardly have a choice in this matter, but your mother will still have your father to assist with the baby and as for your brother… well, I’m sure the time apart will allow you both to grow into confident individuals.”

“That’s not true!” A voice shouted from within the house, soon followed by a sandy-haired boy barreling out the front door. “We’re always better together.”

A light chuckle shook through the older man’s chest at the sight and he motioned for the boy to sit down next to him as well, putting his arm around the young man’s shoulders as he turned his head toward him.

“Your sister has quite the opportunity ahead of her, you wouldn’t want to hold her back, now would you,” he asked. The question had a manipulative ring to it as it left his lips, but he was trying in earnest to move this acquisition along with as little heartbreak as possible. “You and your sister would have to part ways eventually.”

“You government analysts must be really stupid, you know,” Chiyome suddenly shouted. “Big, stupid idiots who don’t know anything at all!”

“Why do you say that,” Nekomata questioned, still slightly amused at her tenacity.

“Because only someone who is really dumb would look at me and think I’m worth anything without Morisuke,” she stated. “We're twins and that makes us a team — a packaged deal!”

“Yeah,” her brother added. “We share our strengths. I’m defense and she’s offense. She’s emotions and I’m logic. I’m the meat and she’s the disgusting vegetables. You can’t have one without the other.”

A muffled “hey” broke through the middle of his speech as Chiyome reached behind the agent to poke her brother in the side. A wide smile broke out on Nekomata’s face as he watched them interact, but no amount of fleeting childhood joy and amusement could bend the rules he’d been sworn to keep.

“That’s quite a little partnership you have there,” he mused before shrugging his shoulders and pointing to the girl with his thumb. “But still, the government only wants her and there’s nothing I can do about that.”

“No,” she said sternly. “I’m not going without Morisuke.”

“I can’t take him,” Nekomata answered. “And we need to get going. You have to come with me now; there’s no getting around it.”

“Then kill me,” she said, her eyes meeting the agent’s with unwavering sincerity.

\- - -

For all intents and purposes, the fire department was treating the emergency as if Kuroo Chiyome was already dead. The flames were still licking at the bones of their wooden meal, and the hoses were still throwing up gallons of the city’s water supply, but the tactic for the site had switched from preventing loss of life, to preventing the spread of the flames. And as Kuroo Tetsurou lay on the asphalt, in the middle of his street, he was faced with the crashing reality that they had stopped attempting to rescue his wife more than 17 minutes ago.

He’d always been a logical, if not scientific, guy. In the field, he was best known for getting people to talk, but he also had a reputation for keeping a level head in times of crisis. It’s just that, none of those crises had ever involved the woman he loved likely residing at the center of an inferno. I mean, don’t get him wrong, Chiyome had always been in the same line of work and she was known for pushing her limits. She was not a woman who needed a man to feel safe — and regularly told him so as he begged her not to take certain missions because of how dangerous they were.

They had specifically moved her to this job though, because it was time for her to take on something slower. It wasn’t supposed to be dangerous. It wasn’t supposed to even remotely have the probability of turning to ashes before their eyes and, to top it all off, it certainly wasn’t supposed to get personal — not in a way where their home would be burning with her trapped inside. _She wasn’t even working today_!

So all logic was out the window. It didn’t matter that he knew that a human could only survive temperatures up to 212 degrees Fahrenheit and that fires usually hit the 500s in less than five minutes. It didn’t matter that he knew that lethal respiratory burns can occur in less than 250 seconds. It didn’t matter that this fire had started more than an hour ago and not a single soul had seen her before or after it started; his wife was in that building and she needed to be saved.

“What the hell are you doing in the street,” a voice cracked from above him and he opened his eyes to a sandy-haired face filled with tears. Kuroo closed his eyes again and threw his arm over his face. Only a beat passed before the arm was yanked away and he was hauled upright. “Where’s Chiyo,” Yaku asked, his voice strained. “Where is my sister?”

The dam in Kuroo’s throat broke completely and it was seconds before he couldn’t make out the shape of the man in front of him anymore. Yaku immediately fell to his knees in front of his colleague and buried his head in the hands upon his knees.

“That stupid, idiot,” he sobbed. “She’s not supposed to go somewhere I can’t follow.”


	3. Chapter 3

Kuroo didn’t like to think back on his first impression of Chiyome — it only served to show him that he started his career from a very low place. 

That first day, after the strange opening remarks and a hasty tour of the grounds, the new recruits were left mainly to their own devices and, in perfect adolescent fashion, the newly-minted teenagers soon took to dividing amongst themselves to talk about the day and, particularly, gossip about the 31st member among them. Hibarida Fuki, the director of the National Intelligence Agency (formally known as the Cabinet Intelligence and Research Office) delivered an austere, and frankly frustratingly cryptic, welcome message to the selected children earlier in the day and was quickly followed by small salutations from an assortment of squad leaders before the orientation was ended with a short speech from Hitaki Koutarou, the leader of the intelligence academy, about the coming days. It was his brief ending note that had caught their attention though.

“And in case you were all wondering, you haven’t counted wrong. We do, in fact, have 31 trainees among us,” he said, coyly, before adding with a chuckle, “It seems we had a pair of inseparable siblings this year.”

The statement came out as if they had any choice in the matter. As if the government had specifically selected the twins rather than been held at metaphorical gunpoint by a 13 year-old girl with the type of potential that made them queasy with glee. As if they hadn’t fallen over themselves to agree to her demand once she threatened that potential.

“We have high hopes for them, as well as the rest of you. So, please, settle in and get ready to face the most challenging training of your lives,” he said before giving a light wave and leading the band of officials out the door.

The gossip about the twins seemed to be the only conversation topic the twenty nine other teens deemed worthy enough to carry over to dinner, forcing the Yaku siblings into isolation at a corner table in the mess hall. None of the chattering got to Chiyome, though, as she lectured her brother — the smile on her face serving as a stark contrast to the scowl on his.

“You need to eat more vegetables,” she chided him, moving individual stocks of broccoli and pods of snap peas from her plate to his, one at a time. 

“Protein is what is most important,” he argued, making a failed attempt to move the veggies back to her plate with equal speed.

“Yes, yes, fine. Meat is important. I get it,” she laughed. “But you need to balance your meals better with equal parts red meat and greens.”

“Actually,” a voice spoke up from the side of the table and both siblings looked up, with chopsticks in mid-movement over the other’s plate, to a tall boy standing nearby with a smirk on his face. “It would be better to pair your greens with fish.”

“Oh?” Chiyome toned, her right eyebrow raised, as if she was daring him to continue his interruption.

“Of course,” he responded, almost haughtily. “Fish is much better than meat. Plus, it has omega acids that help with brain function!”

“Well, it clearly hasn’t helped you any,” she mumbled, turning back to her brother and immediately moving peas back to his plate. “So why don’t you go eat your fish somewhere else and hope its omega acids teach you how to mind your own business.”

The smirk on Kuroo’s face was soon replaced with a small snarl as the girl’s brother tried to hide a laugh behind his fist and, just as he was about to go all in on the sandy-haired girl in front of him, a hand grabbed at the hook of his arm and pulled him back.

“Don’t mind her Kuroo,” came the voice of Oikawa Tooru, another recruit who had spent most the evening introducing himself to every other teenager there. “She’s just a girl who couldn’t get in here without her brother begging the government to bring her along.”

The chocolate-haired boy stuck his tongue out at Chiyome briefly before the pair of teens turned to walk toward another table, joining a larger group of boys who had gathered and were animatedly talking with their arms, utensils still in hand.

\- - -

It was weeks later, after individual evaluations and the beginning of endurance building that Chiyome and Kuroo Tetsurou interacted again. After a solid month of working their way toward combat training, the students had been divided up into regional groups under the guidance of two or three unit commanders to guide their training. Morisuke, Kuroo and Chiyome found themselves together under the guidance of Agent Nekomata and Agent Yamiji Takeyuki, along with the likes of Bokuto Koutarou, Konoha Akinori, Gora Masaki and Ogano Daiki.

It had never really occurred to Chiyome that she had been the only girl selected in the Tokyo region until she was standing in a circle of intimidating looking boys and wondering if Nekomata and Yamiji were actually going to make her fight each one of them in hand-to-hand combat over the course of the next two months. From where she was standing (more than a few centimeters below the chin of every boy but her brother) the division by region seemed entirely unfair. _Shouldn’t she have been paired with the other women chosen?_

Nekomata could read the emotions on her face with perfect clarity and had to hold himself back from a chuckle. She may not know it yet, but the boys around her were just as nervous as she was, eyeing each other up with something close to fearful admiration. Instead, he gave her a steady pat on the shoulder as she warmed up her limbs, outside the circle painted on the ground that indicated where the students should fight — hoping that she would understand that she wouldn't be here if they didn’t think she could hold her own against these boys. 

Several of the other boys had faced off against each other already as she finished her warm ups and she was anxious to see who would be the first to witness all the hard work she’d put in during the past month. A small smirk formed on her lips as she faced down a raven-haired bed head and gave him a polite bow before shaking his hand.

“Fancy meeting you here, fish boy,” she joked. At this point, she turned to humor to cover her nerves. “I hope you’re ready to become personally acquainted with the ground.”

Kuroo chuckled as he squeezed her hand a little hard before letting go, moved to his arc of the circle and shot her a grin when he turned around. “I’m not afraid of some girl who had to have her brother sneak her into this academy.”

It was as if, suddenly, all the nerves left her body at once and Chiyome felt her body loosen up as she shook out her legs. Nekomata signaled the start of their fight and Kuroo was on the floor before his calming breath had left his lungs — the result of a particularly swift roundhouse kick to his smug cheek.

“Winner: Yaku,” Yamiji called from the edge, pointing to Chiyome who bowed pointedly at the passed out boy on the floor before walking over to her brother and giving him a low five.

He woke up 15 minutes later with an ice pack on his cheek and a pair of sandy-haired twins sitting beside him whispering.

“I don’t know why you keep letting everyone think I fought to bring you here,” Morisuke muttered, wrapping a cloth bandage around his sister’s hand. 

“It doesn’t really matter to me,” she said flatly. “If it had been you, instead of me, you would have done the same thing. So what difference does it make in the end?”

Kuroo made an inaudible groan as he closed his eyes again and let his neck rest completely. It was the first time he’d felt like a complete fool when it came to Chiyome. 

It wouldn’t be the last.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ⚠ There are some graphic depictions in the first two paragraphs after the break, if you wish to avoid them. ⚠

That first year at the academy had been something else. (In reflection Chiyome and Tetsurou had decided that was the only way to describe it: “something else.”) Not once had Kuroo been able to beat Chiyome in their sparring matches, quickly learning as the year went on why she was so confident that she didn’t have to prove herself to anyone saying she didn’t deserve to be there.

In truth, Kuroo had come to respect both of the Yaku siblings — learning that they were the type of people that didn’t have to be flashy or ostentatious to be powerful. There was a fierceness in their silent presence, like they had defeated you before you even knew they were there.

It was hardly a surprise that, at the end-of-the-year celebration, Chiyome was recognized as the top female recruit of the year, sharing the stage with Ushijima Wakatoshi who had been named the top male. (Kuroo had walked away with rank four behind Sawamura Daichi and Bokuto Koutarou) She tried her best to smile as the rest of her class clapped for her but she was eager to escape the spotlight (and the overbearing presence of Ushijima) and quickly left the party for the academy’s library, where she could read up on interrogation techniques she had yet to practice.

Kuroo had caught her in the hall, though, as she tried to slip away. He was leaning against the wall of the hallway as she turned away from the large wooden door she had carefully closed to not make a noise.

“Bet you just loved that,” he sneered. “Having all that attention on you, celebrating how _great_ you are.”

Chiyome scrunched her nose at the thought as the corners of her mouth gave way to gravity.

“Of course not,” she sighed. “I’d much rather be consistent than stand out every now and again. It’s a proven fact that the flames that burn the brightest, fade the fastest.”

\- - -

“We have no way to identify the body,” the firefighter spoke to him, but the words were passing by Kuroo just as easily as the breeze. “It was very clearly purposeful, even the teeth were removed.”

He should have told them to spare the details. He didn’t need to know that she’d been tied up. That, despite the body already being burned beyond recognition, the hands and head showed signs of trauma purposely intended to hinder identification. He didn’t need to know that she had probably been tortured and killed before the fire even spread, but a part of him _wanted_ to know so that every unforgettable, inexcusable detail would fuel the hatred inside of him for whoever had the balls to go after his family.

It wouldn’t take a genius to figure it out (though he did have Kenma on speaker phone for backup). She’d been on assignment to break into the ranks of an international organization who had recently taken to planting their agents into countries by posing them as school teachers. It was a solid plan, really, create dissent and unrest in communities by rallying up educators (already angry about the government shifting the curriculum to be overly-nationalistic and about the devaluation of education in general) and brainwash an entire cohort of school children.

Chiyome had been reluctant to take the mission — immediately telling Habarida to give it to a different agent, but recent revelations about a particularly long-lasting bout of the flu had Tetsurou practically begging her take on the milder job.

It would be safer, he had argued. There was less moving around, more breaks in the day and the guarantee that, some days, she would be able to get off her feet by 4 pm. There’d be little running, hardly any jumping and a fat chance that she’d be fighting. It was the perfect assignment if she wanted to keep working through this situation. The _only_ assignment, really.

He should have made her quit.

“I think that’s enough for now, Captain,” Kenma’s voice echoed flatly through the phone, cutting the fire investigation lead off from continuing on his findings. “We can look through the full report later.”

“Right,” the fire captain responded, straightening his back before giving a goodbye nod. “I’ll be on my way then.”

Phone static drifted in the air as Kuroo watched the man in orange walk away. A light rustling from the speaker forced his sights downward to the phone clutched so firmly in his right hand that his knuckles had turned pale and his wrist was shaking.

“I’ll take care of it,” came Kenma’s voice, in between the rustling of paper and typings on a keyboard.

“But-,” Kuroo started, the word barely making it past his throat.

“I’ve already messaged Akaashi to drive you to your grandmother’s,” Kenma continued. “Sleep tonight and tomorrow I _might_ let you help me.”

There was a pause as Kuroo tried to find the words to argue, tried to make himself move even an inch if it meant he could prove he had the strength to keep going, but his system was shutting down.

“You’re not the only one who wants to find these guys,” Kenma said softly. “Trust me.”

\- - -

Chiyome’s second year at the academy was christened with yelling and, frankly, Nekomata should have seen it coming. But that Yaku girl needed to learn to trust other people and he’d be damned if he gave her the easy way out by partnering her with her brother — a grown man could only acquiesce to a 14-year-old girl so many times before his pride and authority were called into question.

Such things were hardly on Chiyome’s mind though when she saw her name next to Kuroo’s on the bulletin board outside their Year 2 classroom, announcing the partnerships for the entire year’s worth of test missions.

“You have to switch with me,” she said to Iwaizumi Hajime as she caught him by the sleeve in the hallway. He had given her an amused half-smile before unlatching her fingers from his blazer and shaking his head.

“I don’t want to be with that cocky rooster-head anymore than you do,” he stated. “But, even so, Irihata-sensei already said the partnerships were non negotiable.”

A questioning look from the girl forced him to shrug his shoulders and add, “I asked the moment I saw your brother’s name next to mine. I knew you’d come asking.”

“You’re so perceptive Iwa-kun,” she responded sarcastically, slowly rolling her eyes. “It’s no wonder you were chosen to be here.”

Kuroo was equally distraught, throwing out several “trade with me bros” before accepting defeat and trudging into the classroom with his head slumped and hands stuffed in his pockets. No amount of begging (or yelling) was going to change the terrible year — he’d just suck it up and deal with it.

That mentality didn’t last long, though, as they ran across the movie studio-like setup in the back corner of the academy grounds during their very first test mission, throwing insults over their shoulders at the other. They had just made it to the top of the practice office building, after sprinting (and in Kuroo’s case, tripping) up three flights of stairs and were preparing to repel over the edge of the roof.

Chiyome had gotten to her mark first, after “accidentally” letting the wind blow the stairwell door back in her partner’s face and immediately took to securing her line. She had finished her preparations by the time Kuroo lined up next to her. She shot him a smirk and a mock salute before diving over the edge, shouting “catch me if you can, loser” as she fell. Not to be outdone, Kuroo hastily secured his line and hopped over the edge… only for his foot to catch in a loop of his line as he neared the bottom, leaving him swinging by the ankle in his own momentum.

When the world finally stopped rocking back and forth, his ears filled with the sounds of Chiyome doubled over in the kind of ungraceful laughter that follows only the worst slapstick comedy.

“God, this is all your fault,” Kuroo groaned, his arms still dangling above his head. “You know we were supposed to work together, right? What is your deal, anyway?”

“I’m sorry. I’m just used to dealing with a higher caliber of a man,” she said with a shrug as she poked his shoulder, sending him into extremely slow rotations around the axis of his trapped foot. “Morisuke would have made it through without a single mistake. You’re the only issue here.”

They failed the mission.


	5. Chapter 5

It took Kuroo and Chiyome six weeks and 13 test missions to learn to work together — beating out both Nekomata and Yamiji’s predictions at seven missions and four, respectively. (Yamiji is a bit a dreamer, let's be honest.) By the end of their second year they were moving together like a well oiled machine... only to snap out the fantasy the moment the mission ended and immediately take to bickering before walking off in opposite directions, not to speak again until the next one.

Their arguments caused such a ruckus that the unit leaders, with the understanding that it was their place to show young recruits the meaning of the adage “it could always be worse,” decided to use the third year assignments to show Chiyome and Kuroo what a real challenge was. So when the beginning of the academic year rolled around (after just a three day break from the previous year) Chiyome’s name stood next to Bokuto’s and Kuroo’s beside one Terushima Yuuji, much to the relief of one Sawamura Daichi, who was still having nightmares about Bokuto’s fuck ups involving explosives and one Kita Shinsuke, who had gotten suspiciously good at identifying poisons during his year with Terushima.

The pairings raised a few eyebrows of the higher-ups, but Nekomata eased all worries by reminding them that third year was when, for half the missions, upperclassmen were added to the mix for guidance and to foster relationships between the different grades.

Chiyome had shrugged at the assignment, still a little peeved she wasn’t with her brother but she figured, as long as it wasn’t Kuroo again, she could handle anything. Kuroo, on the other hand, had just spent a year getting used to one person's quirks and he wasn’t looking forward to another’s. On the other hand, he knew Bokuto rather well and the thought of Chiyome struggling to reign the boisterous boy in was both amusing and terrifying.

In his two years, so far, at the academy the raven-haired teen had stood out amongst his peers as one of the most fiercely loyal recruits — protecting even those he didn’t agree with simply because they were on his team. Kuroo would have never said that sense of loyalty and concern extended to that stubborn girl he’d been partnered with the year before, but as he watched her walk with the loud-mouthed, overly excited, ticking time bomb of a man, he felt the need to make sure she would be okay.

“Hey,” he said to her as he grabbed her arm in the courtyard between the classroom and mission area. “Be careful, okay? Bokuto is a loose canon and you could get hurt if you don’t treat missions with him with caution.”

His words were met with a slight frown as Chiyome looked up at him with scrunched brows.

“I’m not incompetent, Kuroo,” she said, yanking her arm out of his grasp and turning away from him. “Your concern is insulting.”

\- - -

Tears were running down Kuroo’s face as he desperately swiped at his cheeks with the sleeve of his black suit. There were dozens of things he could have had on his mind that moment. Kenma was at his right and Yaku stood at his left and he could have been concerned about how they were all together and easy targets. He could be fretting over looking too much like an emotional wreck when he’s supposed to be a hardened secret agent. He could be cursing himself for destroying his only good suit with his sweat and the never ending leaking of his eyes, but the only thought on his mind as incense swirled around his head was that Chiyome would have hated all this attention

“God, this is all your fault,” he whispered to the closed casket. “You wouldn’t have any of this attention if you’d just let me protect you.”

There was so much more to do. More ceremony, more steps, more mourning, but the government was running the show and everything was going to go quick. Right now, this was the last time he could pretend she was still okay, hidden inside that wooden box, but soon, she’d be ashes in his hand, ready to float away forever. The thought was overwhelming and he tuned out the world as he let himself fall to his knees before her, leaning his head on the cool wood with tears streaming down his neck.

“We were supposed to work together, always,” he cried. “This wasn’t the deal.”

\- - -

In her four years at the academy, Chiyome had never ran as fast as she was running down the halls on that mid-summer day when Irihata had finally agreed to let her run ops with her kohai, Kozume Kenma, for their newly formed group on their second-ever, six-man test mission. There was something about the quiet, dutiful work of Kenma that made her want to watch it up close and she had been begging, since the group’s first mission at the beginning of the new school year, to get a chance behind the computers instead of taking to the field.

She hadn’t meant to eavesdrop on Akaashi’s team as he calmly led them through their mission on the other side of the room, but (in her defense) she’d never heard the level-headed teenager curse like that before and, when she whipped her head around from her discussion with Kenma, she never expected to see blood. She instantly understood why the usually-calm boy had shouted “fucking damnit, Tendou” into the quiet room as she watched four other members of his team scramble around on the screen to aid their raven-haired member who was on the ground with a huge gash in his leg.

“You suck ass at booby traps, Satori,” Kuroo groaned, clutching his leg. “How’d you even make it out of basic training.”

“My bad, dude,” Tendou said, crouching down beside the bed head.

“You should have just let the idiot take the blow himself,” muttered Futakuchi Kenji, leaning down to help his injured teammate up with an extended hand. It quickly became clear, though, that Kuroo would not be walking back to the academy on his own as his eyes closed when he should have been reaching for Futakuchi’s hand.

Chiyome was out of the room before Kuroo’s team had him off the ground, her chair spinning in her wake. Later she would argue that she was eager to learn how to treat wounds first-hand, but as she ran down the twisting halls of the academy her mind was fixated on how deep Kuroo’s wound appeared and trying to estimate how much blood he would have lost by the time he made it to the infirmary.

Kuroo’s team was met at the academy’s door by a group of medical trainees with a gurney and, four turns down long hallways later, almost crashed into a flush-faced fourth year with sandy hair who started throwing questions at them immediately. The injured teen, himself, was fading in and out of consciousness — taking in only flashes of the life, literally, whooshing by him as he was pushed down the hall — and while it seemed like, soon, he would lose the battle to fight off the darkness, Chiyome’s voice seemed to anchor him in the present.

“Didn’t know you cared that much, Yaku-chan,” he teased with a raspy voice, using all his effort to open one eye while pushing the words out. If it had been any other moment, she would have hit him, but she took his hand in hers as she ran beside his gurney and squeezed it lightly.

“You’re such an idiot,” she chided with her head turned forward, refusing to look at him as all the panic and worry began to manifest in her tear ducts.

Three hours later, a disheveled and exhausted Morisuke made his own hurried trip down the school halls, trying to locate his sister and friend after his team’s successful test mission. He’d been briefed about the incident involving Kuroo and was mildly worried about him, but as he paced toward the infirmary, he was still fuzzy on where, exactly, his sister came into the picture.

He didn’t know if he should be worried about her as well. If, somehow, she had been injured in the command center during her mission or maybe after they’d finished. His questions were all answered fairly quickly upon stepping into the entrance of Kuroo’s treatment room. Though, they were quickly replaced with others.

“When did _this_ happen,” he asked, staring at his sister fast asleep in Kuroo’s arms, curled up next to him on the hospital bed. The boy’s leg was bandaged and elevated slightly on three pillows, but his face showed only contentment as he slept with his head resting on Chiyome’s.

In a chair beside the bed, Kenma looked up briefly from his phone to make eye contact with Morisuke and give him an uninterested (and unhelpful) shrug before returning his attention back to the device.

\- - -

He couldn’t do it.

The whole process wasn’t a surprise. It was part of their culture for God’s sake, but when it came right down to it, Kuroo just couldn’t be in the room when they started transferring the bones to the urn. He told himself he would — that as her husband, he was supposed to be the one to move what remained of her from the ashes to the urn — but his hands wouldn’t stop shaking and he was afraid he was going to drop her and he just couldn’t do it.

Morisuke had opted out too, choosing to follow his brother-in-law outside to the benches in front of the crematorium and sit with his head tilted back and eyes closed. He’d left for a different reason though. A reason that was still gnawing away at any sympathy Kuroo had left for his friend.

“You should have stayed,” Kuroo mumbled after about three minutes of silence. “She deserves to have some family with her.”

Yaku didn’t respond. He didn’t even move while the bedhead kept his sharp eyes on him. For the brother of a recently murdered woman, Morisuke looked too calm. Too unbothered. Too, just, not-sad. And the mere fact that he had the gall to sit outside while she was being put to rest and not look completely overwhelmed and shattered pissed Kuroo the fuck off.

This man beside him, on this wooden bench outside a funeral home, was the brother of a woman who had literally put her life on the line to have her brother by her side — that was how much she loved him and how strong their bond had been. Yet, he was here only because Kuroo had dragged him and was now refusing to take part.

“You haven’t cried since the fire,” Kuroo pointed out, trying to keep his voice level. “Shouldn't you be a little bit more broken up about your _twin_ sister being gone?”

Yaku shrugged, keeping his head held back, before answering. “That’s not my sister in there.”

“Yaku,” Kuroo sighed, fighting the urge to ball his fists and substitute his anger for sympathy toward a man that was clearly in denial. “We’ve been over this, man. You have to accept this for what it is.”

“You don’t understand,” Yaku responded, finally raising his head as he leaned over and rested his elbows on his knees. “You’re not a twin. I _know_ she’s not dead. I can _feel_ it.”

They were supposed to be rational men. Men trained to analyze situations fully, to be cautious, to be tactical and to be emotionless. They’d spent most of their adolescent lives training to be the perfect, heartless spies for their country. But here they were, side by side on a bench — one crying for the loss of his love and the hopelessness of a friend and the other convinced reality was just a lie.


	6. Chapter 6

She should have never invited Kumi-Chan over that morning. If there was anything that she regretted the most, as she sat on a cement floor in a room with matching walls and not even a flicker of light, it was that. Because in that dark room, with her head pounding and her arms aching, as they strained against the cuffs holding her hands behind her back, there was one thing she was certain of: Hamato Kumi was dead and it was all her fault.

Maybe if she hadn’t gone soft in her four months on this cushy job, she would have recognized the signs. If she hadn’t gotten used to being a teacher first and a spy second, she would have known her cover was blown two weeks ago when that sleazy looking substitute with the snake-like face had asked her about her alias’ alma mater and she had named the wrong mascot. She was supposed to be a professional — unflappable — when it came to these sorts of small details of the job, but the pregnancy brain was getting to her. She could blame the hormones and the tiny person kicking up a storm in her stomach all she wanted, but she had been the one that let her guard down and not only blew her cover, but mindlessly put another person in danger. It was her fault for thinking there was no harm in making a real friend while on assignment.

The mission had been simple enough: infiltrate the school as a new teacher, find and investigate the suspected foreign agents and lead the NIA to shut down the indoctrination program. It was so unexciting and plain that Chiyome had passed on it immediately, but a positive EPT and a husband she was never supposed to have had convinced her of the merits of a slower job. She’d probably gone into the whole operation in the wrong headspace — already writing it off as an easy assignment, without realizing just how hard it was to be a teacher, let alone _fake_ being one.

Even the small things caused struggles in the beginning. Chiyome met Hamato Kumi on her second day as a fake educator. She had been in the middle of an intense battle with the copier in the staff room when a tall woman with long black hair placed her slender hand on the machine and commanded it to do as Chiyome wished with a small laugh.

“Oh sure, you work for the pretty lady,” Chiyome mumbled as it started spitting out the forms she’d been struggling to multiple for the last 10 minutes. She looked up at the woman to her right, who was still chuckling into her hand, with something just short of awe twinkling in her eyes.

“Don’t let it bother you,” she said with a smile. “It’s a picky thing and takes some getting used to.”

“Oh,” Chiyome replied, turning back to the copier with a frown as she gathered up the warm prints on its left side.

“I’m Hamato Kumi, by the way,” the other woman stated, offering out her hand. “You’re the new temporary teacher, right?”

Moving the papers under her left arm, Chiyome gripped Kumi’s hand with her own and hummed in affirmation while shaking hands. “Yeah, I’m Fujimoto Natsu,” she said. “I’m just here until they find a permanent replacement for Ito-san.” (Ito Yasuko was currently on an overseas vacation paid for by the Japanese government as they used her now-vacated position to their benefit. Though, she had told the school she needed to quit for her health.)

Kumi and Chiyome’s first encounter had ended with a promise to teach Chiyome the ropes when it came to copiers and the assurance that, while the first few months of teaching were the hardest, she would come to enjoy being an educator once she got the hang of it.

It was almost comical how hard Chiyome had tried to avoid Kumi after that. She’d taken to eating in her own classroom, only using shared technology and spaces when she was sure other teachers would be busy or gone for the day, and rushing to and from her car at the beginning and end of school. None of it was enough to escape that crafty history teacher and her incessant need to gossip about the new physical education teacher who had invited both women out to drinks, separately and several times, despite one wearing a ring and the other giving off very strong “fuck off” vibes.

Chiyome ended up caving and Daishou Suguru ended up being the least of what the two women had in common. Kumi was also expecting and Chiyome suddenly found that there was an unexplainable exhilaration in having even just one person to complain to about mundane nuisances — like the fact that her boobs had suddenly outgrown her underwire, but the sports bra chaffed too much with daily wear.

Their friendship was light and beautiful — filled with the kind of laughter that grew like their swollen bellies and echoed in the air well after it ended, and with the the kinship that could only grow between two strong, independent women as they held hands in the maternity store and cried over just how small newborn onesies were.

In all of that, she’d forgotten the most important lesson of all: danger isn’t bound by time or space. It doesn’t care about onesies or infant formula or copy machines or friendships. And it never will.

\- - -

“Chiyo, please, slow down a little,” an exasperated Kuroo called after the brunette as she continued to power walk toward her academy dorm room, ignoring him. “I get that you’re upset and everything, but not talking to me isn’t going to make this any easier.”

He only got a small huff in response as she pulled out her keys and swiftly rounded the last turn down the hallway her room resided on. Unconsciously, she slowed as she neared the door and that, combined with her struggling to fit the key into the lock with shaking hands, gave Kuroo enough time to catch the edge of the door before it slid shut behind her.

A brief glance around the room gave him the assurance that Chiyome’s roommate, Shimizu, was not around and he took three large steps toward her before wrapping his long arms around her center and pulling her back into his chest. With his nose tucked next to her ear, he took a deep breath and squeezed her tight.

“I just can’t believe they chose you,” she whispered, stilling completely in his arms. “ _I’m_ the top student. If anyone should be getting the first real mission in our class, it should have been me.”

“They needed a boy, though,” Kuroo said through a grin, turning her around to face him.

“I could have cut my hair,” she mumbled back, not looking him in the eye as her lips formed a small pout.

“I think your hair was the least of their worries, babe,” he responded, brushing his right thumb across her cheek as he reached down to squeeze at her thigh with his left. “Besides, it’s going to be dangerous.”

“Every mission is going to be dangerous, Tetsu,” she said, finally turning her head to meet his gaze. “That’s why we’ve been training here for six years. That’s why they keep telling us to be diligent, to be tactical, to not get attached.”

“It’s a little late for that,” Kuroo quipped, leaning forward to rest his forehead against Chiyome’s. He let himself rest against her, with his eyes closed, basking in the feeling of her warmth against him and his arms wound tightly around her, before he pushed away and looked her in the eye. “I’m glad it’s not you.”

“Don’t say stupid things like that,” she responded, flatly, looking off the side as she tried to fight off the heat rising to her cheeks. She had more important things to address at that moment, like the burning in the pit of her stomach that wouldn’t go away, no matter how many bottles of water she chugged and wouldn’t be soothed with any amount of internal chiding — or the fact that when her lids closed over her eyes, the black backdrop allowed her mind to play projections of the worst possible outcomes without the least bit of prompting.

And then there were all the words she still needed to say — the ones that carried the weight of her heart from her mouth to his ears with promises of forever. How many times had they said “I love you” since they realized they’d rather have each other than a life without feeling? It wasn’t enough, because in two days he was going on his first real mission and, Tashiro Hidemi, the first recruit to get an assignment the previous year never made it back to the academy.

As far as Chiyome was concerned, fear was a nonplus. She’d fought for things she believed in with the understanding that any one word against the government could send her to the gods. But when it came to the possibility of facing a single day without him, knowing that the world would keep turning even if his heart stopped beating, she could admit that the name of the monster licking away at her insides, and replacing her blood with ice water, was terror.

“Do you think I’m really mad they chose you over me?”

“But… you said?” He looked like a confused puppy in the aftermath of its owner pretending to throw the tennis ball, now hidden behind their back.

“Idiot,” she spat before reaching up and pulling his face toward hers, pushing their lips together before letting go of his head to continue. “I wish it wasn’t you.”

“Your concern is insulting,” he whispered, the words brushing over her lips as he leaned into another kiss with a smirk.

When they finally broke apart there were tears slipping down Chiyome’s flushed cheeks. They opened their eyes at the same time and Kuroo instantly took to wiping the streaks away with the pads of his thumbs.

“Hey, hey, don’t cry,” he mumbled. “It’s all going to be alright. You’ll see.”

Chiyome just shook her head in response and pushed her face into her boyfriend’s chest, inwardly cursing herself in several languages. She wasn’t supposed to be this weak, this attached, this desperate for some assurance that this person who she once despised so much, would be safe — that they had some future together beyond this mission and this final year at the academy.

Suddenly, she pushed away from him fully, furiously swiping away the moisture on her face before moving her eyes upward and setting them on him with a serious stare.

“Marry me,” she stated, her face completely straight.

“Wha-,” Kuroo tried to reply.

“Marry me,” she repeated. “Before you leave.”

“We’re not even supposed to be dating,” Kuroo mused, his eyes crinkling lightly despite the fact that he was trying to keep a smile off his face. “There’s no way they’ll let us get married.”

Despite the connotation, they both knew his response wasn’t a no. It was a challenge. He was asking her if she was ready to take the risks that would come with going all in — as if he didn’t know the woman standing across from him already had all her chips on the table from the moment Nekomata entered her house. As if she hadn’t looked death straight in the face and called him a coward.

He already knew her answer.

“What are they going to do,” she asked, her words laced with a rhetorical challenge, “Toss out two of their best recruits after investing so much in us already? You think they’ll try to kill us? Let ‘em.”

“So,” Kuroo started, reaching out to pull Chiyome close to him. “Tomorrow then? At the courthouse down the street?”

“I’ll bring Morisuke,” she said with a light nod and he lifted her chin to connect their lips once more.

They jumped apart suddenly as the knob on the door rattled briefly and the door was pushed open by Chiyome’s roommate, who eyed them suspiciously with a sly half-smile.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” Chiyome whispered to Kuroo with a light squeeze of his hand before taking on a different tone to play off the moment. “I hope your mission goes well, Kuroo-san.”

“Thanks, Yaku-chan. I’ll see you around,” he replied, slipping out the door and disappearing into the hall.

The moment the door swung shut, Kiyoko rounded on her roommate.

“You would think the top student would know we’re not supposed to fall in love,” she teased.

Chiyome shrugged as she turned to her closet and began to search for something that didn’t scream “I’ve been trapped in a government-run school for the past six years with little contact with the outside world” to wear to the courthouse tomorrow where she would get her promise of a future.

No matter how hard the academy, the government, or even the world tried to change her, Chiyome would always be an incredibly stubborn and loyal woman and, in the end, her heart always won.

\- - -

There wasn’t an easy way to estimate the passage of time in that closed off room where those four men had thrown her to the ground and honestly, her internal clock was a little faulty, but if she _had_ to take a guess, Chiyome would have said it’d been three days since the fire. Three days since Kumi had knocked on her door at 11 am and insisted they were going to have an at-home spa day packed full with face masks, foot baths and bad romantic comedies. Three days since that snake-faced maniac broke through her and Kuroo’s front door sporting a silver pistol in his hand and twisted smirk on his unusually thin lips.

There is nothing quite like the full smack in the face reality gives you when you come up against something you’ve forgotten and, as that old, but all too familiar, rush of adrenaline punched her in the nose, Chiyome realized she’d really let herself believe she was nothing more than a pregnant school teacher. Her instincts, on the other hand, immediately grabbed Kumi and pushed the two of them to the ground, her free hand immediately reaching under the couch for the pistol Kuroo had hidden there. (She’d laughed at him when he’d done it, straight-faced saying it was for “in case of an emergency.” Chiyome had joked it was better off in the kitchen pantry, since that was where he seemed to spend the most time.) _Leave it to a man who once wanted to be a ninja to hide a weapon in the perfect spot._

Thinking back, Chiyome wasn’t surprised it ended up being Daishou. She wasn’t even _that_ surprised he’d busted into her house on the school holiday when someone was over. (That was on her for letting her guard down, because she had given him the perfect opportunity to ensure his success: catching her off guard and with a civilian to protect.) What she was most surprised by was the fact that Kumi didn’t scream. Instead her pupils dilated so wide her irises nearly disappeared and she slapped her hand so firmly on her mouth Chiyome was sure purple splotches would rise in her fingers’ wake, but Kumi somehow managed to delegate all her emotions into her quaking arms. Chiyome would have been impressed — if she hadn’t been completely consumed in figuring out how to ensure the other woman would live to see her bruises.

“Don’t worry,” she whispered, releasing the magazine at the bottom of the handgun to check the rounds before clearing the slide, slamming the magazine back up into the butt of the gun and pulling the slide back. Silently, she rose to one knee and peeked her head around the arm of the couch. “Just stick close to me. I’ll get us out of here.”

There were dozens of reasons Chiyome’s heart had settled on this house: the windows, the curve-topped door, the white kitchen, even the way the sunlight streaked across the living room in the early afternoon. They were vain, stylistic reasons that she fought for, tooth and nail, but the most practical selling point had been the lack of access points: just two doors and a whole lot of un-openable windows. Kuroo thought having control of the ways in and out would keep them safe, but now the lack of choices left Chiyome frowning over the scenarios playing out in her head as she searched for the best way to get the two of them out, safely.

Her arms made the decision for her, her brain barely computing that she had grabbed the tabletop lamp nearby and thrown it through the closest window. She wasn’t sure if it was the glass shattering or the bullet digging into the couch stuffing next to her head that broke her out of her ruminations, but either way she knew she had to start moving. Survival wouldn’t wait for the perfect plan.

She reached the window in four hobbled steps and immediately took to smashing out the jagged fragments still left in the frame with the butt of her elbow. Chiyome shrugged off her jacket, threw it over the edge and pushed her way out the window, turning back to the opening when she landed and reached back to Kumi with a waving motion.

Kumi only had one shoe on when her feet finally hit the mossy ground outside the window, but they hardly had time to worry about pieces of glass and the probability of blisters. Chiyome hurriedly pulled the shoe off the other woman’s foot, grabbed her hand and ran. Ran until the cursing voices inside the house and the shrill barking of their leader were secondary noises to the air screaming in her ears and car horns blaring out over the mirrored obscenities screamed by drivers behind their windshields. Until her swollen ankles begged for mercy despite every ounce of her adrenaline imploring her to put as much distance between her fragile human body and the sounds of fireworks ricocheting off of every nearby surface. Until she was face down in concrete with her hands behind her back and those vicious snake eyes looking down at her with something close to hunger swirling behind them as his tongue swiped out across his lips.

It was eerily similar to the way he was looking at her now, though she was still looking at concrete.

“It’s a shame you were right about poor little Kumi-chan not knowing anything,” Daishou practically hummed. “Maybe she would have lived if she’d given me anything to work with.”

If her limbs were free, Chiyome was sure she could wipe that tight-lipped smirk off his face before he’d even registered that she’d moved. She wanted to scream at him until the monster eating away at her insides escaped and ate him instead. Tell him off for looking pleased with himself when there was no way he could wash the shadows of Kumi’s blood off his hands. Berate him for thinking he’d accomplished anything by killing an innocent woman. Demand to know if he knew he took more than one life. Ask him if he was proud.

“For someone so enamored with his own righteousness, you are sure quick to play off the impiety of murdering a pregnant woman,” she pondered, her voice flat and guarded. “Is that what you teach your followers? To take out the weak and helpless?”

“You speak as if you didn’t have a gun in your hand when I trapped you,” he responded with an amused smile, crossing the small distance between them before kneeling in front of her and taking her chin in his hand. “We’re not that different. Surely you understand the necessity of killing to make a point.”

He dropped the weight of her head with a quick pat to her cheek and rose to his full height. He pulled out a green cloth from his pant pocket, gingerly wiping at his fingers before returning it and swiping his hand through the arc of his parted hair. His tongue traced the bow of his top lip once more before he turned his attention back to the woman on the floor.

“I can’t thank you enough for choosing to befriend such an unattached woman,” he drawled. “It sure made staging your death that much easier.”

He was out the door as fast as he came and Chiyome wasn’t sure how long it was before he returned, waking her with a kick to her back and a laugh about how true filth could fall asleep anywhere. That visit lasted hours — her, tied securely to a metal chair as he circled, questions slipping from his mouth and wrapping around her chest, tighter and tighter with each rotation. Daishou was certain he would break her. He would find a way.

“Your husband was quite the looker,” he said, suddenly ending the questions as he stopped directly to the left side of her chair and leaned forward, hands removed from his pockets and placed on his knees. He settled his lips millimeters from the shell of her ear and exhaled his amusement at her writhing, her hands seemingly struggling to get free behind the two of them. “You should have seen his face when the firefighters stopped him from running straight up to your house.”

He paused, briefly, setting his sights forward as his lips curled into a sickening grin as if he was recalling something particularly beguiling.

“Though I’d say the vacant glaze of his eyes after I shot him was a much better look for that rooster headed bastard,” he chuckled, righting himself as Chiyome let out a strangled sob. The grin on Daishou’s lips widened as his eyes traced over her face and the moisture slowly brimming over her lower lids, her shoulders trembling against their braces.

“Don’t worry your pretty little head about it too much, though,” he teased, walking to the open door and grabbing the handle. “You’ll join him soon.”

The door closed behind him with a mechanical click and Chiyome’s trembling immediately ceased. Her eyes moved from the ground to the door with a sharp blink and her nose twitched above a smirk. Rolling her shoulder slightly, she pulled her left arm out from behind her, black, plastic keycard in hand. Her right arm shook off the loosened ties and moved to flick the tears away from her eyes.

There was nothing to mourn. She knew that without a doubt. Because there was no way her heart would still be beating so strong if he wasn’t with her anymore — no way her lungs would allow her to breathe.

\- - -

The sky was the color of a fresh bruise when she finally pushed her way out of the last metal door of the compound and the world was underwhelmingly quiet for the amount of noise rushing between Chiyome’s ears. It’d taken her all of three days in the cell to be confident in her estimations of the waxing and waning of activity in the building, but she was glad she had waited the extra day to put her plan in motion. Daishou had made it too easy, using her husband for goading and getting lost in the art of making a woman cry.

He treated her capture like a game and acted as if he had already won when he didn’t even know if all the pieces were on the board yet. He used taunts and boasted of fabricated victories while she bided her time playing the role he wanted to see her in — the scared, little woman cornered by the big bad rook. He figured he could trap her by threatening her king, but even a novice player knows you’re supposed to check the queen.

The clouds were painted like cotton candy when she finally felt like she’d put enough distance between her and the hoard of unconscious snakes she’d left behind in the halls of that windowless building. Her feet were covered in open blisters and a layer of black filth as she limped up a gently sloping hill and let gravity pull her down, her tattered clothes allowing the dew on the grass to kiss the skin of her back. She splayed her arms out to the side and tilted her head back to give reverence to the sky, the same hues and rays she hoped were shining over that pair of hazel irises she could imagine glowing at her even with her eyes open.

Chiyome’s chest heaved slowly, up and down and up again, as she closed her eyes and regulated her heartbeat, her mind using the darkness of her closed eyelids to run through the multiple options she had for moving forward, like she was writing algorithms on a chalkboard and crossing them out. She wasn’t confident she wasn’t being tailed and from this point, she’d had to operate on the assumption that she could lead the enemy anywhere she went. Her heart ached to run away to that house in the country Grandmother Kuroo bought years ago, swearing the family would move there when the city stopped enticing them with it’s glowing appeal, or that condo in Tokyo her father moved to with her little sister after saying goodbye to their mother and the cancer that took her long before any of them were ready to let go.

More than anything she wanted to rush back to that heart she knew was aching (because hers was aching too), to press light kisses into his furrowed brows and tell him he needn’t worry, he never should, because she was strong and strong people do their best to never let their loved ones down. Her brother would be next as she slapped him on the back with a smile and the reassurance that she would never break their promise.

It was all much too important to give into such desires. Not one of those things could she stand to imperil and so she would sit on this hillside and face whatever came her way. And she would do what she was taught to do — sacrifice her time and talent and even her life to make sure that everything indispensable was kept safe. Be it government secrets or that annoying man she married.

If there was one thing Chiyome was sure of, it was that Kuroo would come back to her. Years of training together had given her that assurance. He was the type of man who would never stop fighting to get to the ones he loved. So, as she sat on the damp grass on that hill outside the city, hand on her swollen belly, well into her third hour of waiting, she knew. If he was alive, he’d be there soon.

… And if he wasn’t? Well, then, she’d figure that out when the time came.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I blinked and suddenly its been two months since I updated this story. This chapter took me a really long time. There's a lot I like about it, but there's also a lot I'm still not happy with. 
> 
> But, uhm, Chiyome's alive! Was anyone surprised? 
> 
> Two more chapters left. Thanks for sticking with me. 🧡


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